emoji

Disney's Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse have arrived on the Galaxy S9, and the good news is that - unless you're musophobic - they're a lot less creepy than Samsung's AR Emoji. The Disney tie-in launched today, kicking off with America's favorite mouse couple as free downloads for the facial-tracking AR Emoji feature on the newly-shipping Android smartphone.

Samsung promised us Disney AR Emojis for the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+, and sure enough they're arriving here on launch day. One of the headline features on the Android smartphone, AR Emojis use the front-facing camera to track face and body movements and animate a virtual character on-screen.

Samsung is making quite a lot of noise about its new AR Emoji and how it goes beyond simply faces and heads. Curiously, however, it’s not making a big deal out of a literally big deal about one rather huge feature. At its Unpacked 2018 press event where it demoed how its AR Emoji worked, it almost just mentioned in passing that, if you don’t want to have a virtual you, you can also use some of the pre-made models, which includes the globally renowned Mickey Mouse. Which, of course, meant Samsung made a partnership deal with Disney.

Samsung is going to be accused of copying Apple with its AR Emojis on the new Galaxy S9, but there's more to the animated characters than an Animoji clone. One of the headline features on the brand new Android flagships, announced today at Mobile World Congress 2018, here's what you need to know about AR Emojis - and why you should care.

Animoji have surprisingly proven to be a pretty popular feature among iPhone X users, but if new rumors are to be believed, Apple may soon have some competition in the realm of animated emoji. Apparently, Samsung is plotting to introduce a similar feature with the Galaxy S9 and S9+, which are scheduled to be revealed later on this month.

Samsung may have a big year ahead of it with the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9, but we're more excited about it finally redesigning its emojis. The company has begun rolling out Samsung Experience 9.0 and, while there are many different improvements that come along with the Android Oreo update, one of the most welcome is Samsung conceding that some of its existing emoji designs were just... wrong.

Emoji addicts rejoice: 157 new emojis have been approved for 2018 and you can now easily see them all in a convenient video. The list is an expansive one, adding things like an infinity symbol, curly hair and red hair emojis, a kangaroo, and much more. The full emoji 11.0 list has been approved and published, giving vendors a few months to work on their code and fonts before unicode 11.0 arrives in June.

Animoji are perhaps one of the most surprising things to come out of the iPhone X. What seems like a silly little gimmick on the surface has actually managed to capture the hearts of at least some iPhone X users, leading Apple to bolster the Animoji ranks in the upcoming release of iOS 11.3. Today Apple is previewing that iOS update (which is arriving later this spring), along with the new Animoji that will come with it.

Thank goodness, some good news is finally here - Google's taken the time to correct an egregious error. Before today, the Google-designed emoji for the *burger* had its ingredients out of order. It went bun, lettuce, tomato, burger, cheese, bun. That's complete madness of course - the correct order has the cheese ABOVE the burger, to ensure maximum taste and minimum soggy bun.

Quick, what do you think is the most popular smiley in the world? Too hard? How about in the US. If trying to look for a scientific survey of such data is too difficult, you can relax knowing that Apple has done the job for all of us. It has just released what its own data collection has determined to be the most popular smiley in the country, which turned out to be “face with tears of joy”. It even beat out the heart, which you’d think comes up more naturally in conversations.

Google accidentally ignited an Internet debate perhaps only rivaled by the great is-it-white dress debacle of 2015. The Internet giant, you see, released a cheeseburger emoji in which the cheese deviated from norm. That is, Apple and Microsoft both put the cheese above the burger patty, as is customary in many places. But someone -- or many someones -- at Google decided to thumb their nose at traditional and put the cheese below the patty.

iOS 11.1 has been released, and if you're an emoji fan then you may well be delighted with the bumper crop Apple has added - among other things - to your iPhone. The update, pushed out today, also addresses some lingering issues with blurry photos and adds back one of the most popular 3D Touch gestures. However, it's the 70+ new emoji that are likely to get the most attention.